The War Has Not Yet Started, Southwark Playhouse 18 January

This £12 preview had a large and enthusiastic audience–perhaps the actors were famous or something? They were certainly very very good, and there was at most one early-run fluff that I noted.

Someone in the audience had pointed out that the programme didn’t tell you what the play was about, though there was some suggestion it was connected with war as a metaphor for human relationships. Then the set was specifically enough a late-Soviet flat though the action of the twelve separate scenes, all with different characters and situations, seemed to be taking more or less in the present. References to presentations and clients seemed to fix the period, while a character in the first scene drinking vodka and then beer to get calm determined the locale closely enough.

And you could see that war was somehow present in most of the scenes, although the couple copping off at the party and then him saying she was his first and only one might be difficult to fit into that. And also the robot with an absurdity implant waiting to see the doctor. The scenes at the beginning did recall actors doing improvisation exercises, which was all very clever but did they need an audience? Interest did however grow as the evening went on.

A critic on the 172 bus afterwards said she liked the way the women played men and the man played women. I think that wherever possible Sarah Hadland played a man and Mark Quartley played a woman, while Hannah Britland was not so typecast. But it did seem to me her T-shirt was artfully billowed to disguise pregnancy–of the woman not of a character–, and so I was frankly terrified during a scene that threatened domestic abuse.

Now then, in his local media playwright Mikhail Durnenkov gave a very straightforward interpretation of the play–it was meant to fix the period of its writing, when preparations for war were apparent and Russians were subjected to ceaseless propaganda. That gave rise to incomprehension, hatred and violence in ordinary life. The play was written with love for humanity and in the hope that Russia would not fall into the waiting abyss. To me that all makes sense: the inbreaking of war, and rumours of war, result in dislocations–violent dislocations–of everyday life.

And also of sex roles, which might well be more of a shock in Russia than here. The original text says that the thing is meant for three actors who can play the different characters without regard to age and sex. Personally I would have gone for masks and probably a chorus as well. With regard to that text, the translation was more in the line of an adaptation–the original robot just had an absurdity module, while from Thursday I remember an implant, between the second and third vertebrae. A lot of the dialogue had also been normalised from the demotic and individual to general speech of educated people as well.